They Cheered the Water

They Cheered the Water

It’s a warm evening in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, and you’ve brought a glass of wine out to the back deck the way you have for years. The grass, the fence, the slow blue dark coming down. And underneath all of it, something new. A hum. The kind you feel in your chest. A low, constant drone, loud enough to carry over a television and conversations around the fire pit. Some nights you give up on the backyard altogether. You’re considering moving. Three miles away, a 315-acre campus is running 24/7. The hum is the sound of it exhaling. Your backyard is where this story really starts, but not how it was told this week at Microsoft Build. Read or listen to the full piece here and on innovatingoutloud.substack.com [http://innovatingoutloud.substack.com] Connections to The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft: Pattern #4: Innovating More Than Technology — The piece's spine: "not a technology challenge, a business model challenge." Every component already exists — heat exchangers since the early 1900s, quieter-fan designs sitting on the shelf. The book makes the same move, that the decisive innovation is rarely the device but the business model and value chain around it. Pattern #3: Innovating With Everyone — "Build with the place, not around it." Bring community and nature to the table before the design sets. The DOTF team's own precedent in the book — 200 conversations inside and outside before a single concept was drawn — is the proof that the early, optional conversation is the one that changes the outcome. Aim for Positive (#15) / Regenerative Design (#51) — Closing the loop to send a stream of value back into the place instead of throwing waste heat over the fence: surplus by design, not harm reduction. The book quotes Satya asking whether, at the core of the business model, "are you creating a surplus around you?" This piece asks him to finish the question. Top-down, Bottom-up, Outside-in (#16) — All three are in the room and none are wired together: top-down names what to protect (electricity, jobs, tax base); bottom-up is the engineers who already want to build the heat loop; outside-in is the backyard no one invited. The book's argument is that durable change needs the three connected — which is exactly what "external pressure creates internal permission" names: the outside-in voice unlocking what the bottom-up already wants to build. This piece was developed in the open, with AI as a thinking and drafting partner. The argument, the judgment, and the final words are mine. Say it Ugly, Build it Better! Onward! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com [https://innovatingoutloud.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Data Centers: The Tower or The Wall

Between two stories sits one idea: technology is never neutral. It takes on the character of whoever designs it, builds it, and runs it. The tower and the city are built with the same stone. What changes is who decided and who participated. Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft [http://www.innovationatmicrosoft.com] This piece connects directly to four frameworks from the book: * Innovating With Everyone — Nehemiah didn’t hold a stakeholder meeting — he called his neighbors together and gave each family a section to own. The seven-company coalition that designed the Regenerative Data Center operated on Pattern #3’s central premise: engage early, engage widely, engage with empathy. Meet people where they’re at and move forward together. * Top-Down, Bottom-Up, Outside-In — The windowless hall is a pure top-down artifact — decisions made in rooms far from the plain, ignoring the ground-level feedback and community signals coming in. The Regenerative Data Center inverted this deliberately: designed from the bottom up, with hundreds of outside-in voices, human and otherwise. * Aim for Positive — A data center that takes from the county’s water, pulls from the county’s grid, and returns a number on a tax form is aiming for less bad. The Regenerative Data Center aimed for abundance — heat returned to homes, power that steadies the grid, ecology restored, economy supported — mutual benefit by design, not compliance. * Language as Strategic Tool — Leo XIV’s encyclical is a masterclass in strategic language: naming “Babel” and “Nehemiah” rewrites what builders optimize for before they pick up a stone. “Mutual benefit by design” and “each neighbor builds a section” work the same way — deliberate terminology that reframes what a coalition believes is possible, and then makes possible. Sources 1. Leo XIII. “Rerum Novarum: Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Capital and Labor.” Vatican, May 15, 1891. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html 2. Leo XIV. “Magnifica Humanitas.” Vatican, May 15, 2026. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html Written with AI assistance. The thinking — and the stretch of wall — are mine. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com [https://innovatingoutloud.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

Intentional Discovery

In December 2020, I was one year into my time at Microsoft and four months into intentional discovery for my mission, creating the Data Center of the Future. Listen to the full episode to hear behind the scenes stories of what is possibly THE most important practice of innovation as a discipline. How AI, as it's packaged today, erodes it. And why you should make the space for it no matter how hard it may be. --- Don’t miss this week’s live Innovating Out Loud webcast [http://www.regenerouslabs.com/innovatingoutloud]with special guest Jayshree Seth — Corporate Scientist and Chief Science Advocate of 3M. She’ll be sharing her experience and frameworks bridging the gaps between research and practice, business and technology, and data and wisdom. Thursday, May 28th at 9 AM PT / 12 PM ET. --- Connections to The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft [http://www.innovationatmicrosoft.com] Intentional Discovery: purposefully exploring with the goal of ultimately having an impact on the world, residing in Pasteur’s quadrant (of the Stokes framework by the same name). The 200 interviews, the catalog of parts, the journey map from dirt to data — that is intentional discovery in practice. Because intentional discovery is a foundational practice of repeat innovation, it connects to many other frameworks in the book. Here’s a short list: (see the full piece on Substack) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com [https://innovatingoutloud.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

You Don't Need A Cheerleader

Last week I signed up for an expedition to Antarctica. I get terrible seasickness. I hate small planes. Antarctica has never appeared on any version of my bucket list. I signed up anyway. ---- Innovation culture talks constantly about the courage to change. It almost never talks about the voice that tells you not to. Over nineteen weeks, this series has mapped a lot of terrain: systems, tools, collaboration architecture, AI as thinking partner, expert perception, incentive structures, the ecology of innovation at scale. I’ve spent most of that time one level above the person doing the work. This week I’m inside. Not to get philosophical — to get practical. The gap between knowing what good innovation practice looks like and being able to sustain it under real conditions lives right here. In the space where either one or both voices show up. ---- Connections to The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft [http://www.innovationatmicrosoft.com] * Behavior is the Barrier: The barrier isn’t always in the organization — sometimes it’s in the practitioner. The first voice is Behavior is the Barrier operating internally. The innovator who can’t quiet it becomes the bottleneck in their own work. * Cognitive Inertia: The first voice is cognitive inertia in first person. It doesn’t resist change in others — it resists change in you. The second voice is the compelling force that doesn’t come from policy, incentive, or peer pressure. It comes from accumulated internal evidence. * The B2Me Journey — Applied Inward: B2Me, applied outward, is the journey a stakeholder takes from unawareness to advocacy, guided by the innovator. The second voice runs that journey internally. When the first voice fires the fear response — are we even doing anything worth doing? — the second voice doesn’t lead with logic. It leads with emotional reset: not every day is a breakthrough. We worked. We learned. Recovery before rationale. The internal B2Me journey is the same architecture as the external one. IOL is produced with the help of AI, specifically Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and a team of custom personas developed by Regenerous Labs [http://www.regenerouslabs.com/innovatingoutloud]. All insights, editorial choices, and final content are mine. Mistakes too. Say It Ugly, Build It Better. Onward! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com [https://innovatingoutloud.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

"This is the future. I'll Get You the Money."

We’ve all given the presentation that flopped. The content was right. We knew the material. We rehearsed. And we walked out of the room knowing — somehow — that it didn’t land. The post-mortem is honest. Nothing was wrong with the vision. The argument was sound. The slides were clean. The case was the right one to make. And still... Listen to the full piece on Substack or Apple Podcasts. And then try the next experiment: CORTX Reframer. www.regenerouslabs.com/reframer [http://www.regenerouslabs.com/reframer] Take a deck or script you’ve been working on, run it through, and tell me what you find. Say it ugly, build it better. Onward! Connections to The Insider's Guide to Innovation at Microsoft [http://www.innovationatmicrosoft.com] Behavior is the Barrier — Seventy percent of transformations fail for human reasons, not strategic ones. This piece is the pattern made personal: every presentation that flopped, every pitch that didn't land, every meeting where the right argument got the wrong response — the gap between knowing your audience and writing for your audience is where most of it lives. The Knowing-Doing Gap — Knowing what to do and doing it are not the same. Holding three or four audience models in your head while you decide what goes on a slide is expensive cognitive work, so we shortcut and write for ourselves. The reframer pays the cost so you can act on what you already know. Language as a Strategic Tool — Same vision, different register, different decision. The reframer doesn't change the case. It changes which version of the case the listener's brain can actually run. The lenses moving is what this pattern looks like in practice. Start With Who — The reframer's first move is to ask who is in the room before it touches the content. The pattern most often applied to assembling the team applies just as much to addressing the audience. Different listeners need different stories — Start With Who, then build the case. Innovate Upstream to Succeed Downstream — The decision happens in the room. The conditions for it are made before. The reframer is upstream work — done before the pitch, the renewal call, the board meeting — that determines what's possible downstream. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit innovatingoutloud.substack.com [https://innovatingoutloud.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]